A slender novel

Well, first of all, I enjoy posting a video that has little or nothing to do with my post, which today is about my trimming a 320 page novel to 206 pages. The video, on the other hand, is one I made for the Jenna Book Club on the Today Show of me reading a Mary Oliver poem.

A few years ago, I felt successful when I trimmed my 650 page novel to 320 pages for The Waters. Yes, that was a rather stout novel before diet and exercise. Prosperous, my Grandpa Frank might have said—that was his word for the generously proportioned. This time I wrote what I had been led to believe was a novel of very reasonable proportions: 320 pages.

So I sent the novel to Bill, my brilliant agent, and he had a lot of good advice about making the thing better, clearer, more compelling. Then he said, “And cut it down to about 200 pages.” Huh? I said. Okay, I said. I never argue with Bill

I wanted to cry, though. Meanwhile, I had also sent the novel to my brilliant editor friend Heidi. She had a lot of advice for the novel, including suggestions for lots more information I should include to make things better, clearer, more compelling.

In other words, to make things clearer, about why people were behaving in the irrational ways they behaved in my novel, Heidi felt I would need to add more! Like Bill, Heidi is always right. So I was in a pickle.

Also, Heidi told me to make sure my settings were absolutely clear. In my last novel, she told me this, and when I drew a picture of the cottage on the island, I realized the character could not, in fact, look out the window to see what I claimed she saw. Not unless the island included a fourth dimension or a passageway to Narnia.

The first thing I did in revision was add a prologue (see last post), and that not only made some things clearer and simpler, but it allowed me to cut a whole lot of things from later in the book. The prologue is in the omniscient voice and so it allowed me to state plainly many things that I otherwise I’d had to reveal to the reader painstakingly through dialog.

To make a very long, painful, and harrowing story short, it is two months later, and I have a 203 page novel that has all the movement of my 320 page novel but without some of the nooks and crannies of the longer version. What I had to do to make it shorter was cut out a lot of complexity and ambiguity. It is okay, I told myself, for some people not to be of two minds on a subject. (Or three or four minds.)

For another writer, this would probably not be the best advice, but I find that as I write and revise, everything becomes more ambiguous. I tend to make things so psychologically complicated that the story has a hard time moving forward. In other words, the ultimate unedited BJC novel would be one in which nothing happened but where you saw deeper and deeper into the characters, becoming profoundly aware of exactly how they are. In other words, not a novel most folks would want to read.

Now I have what my friend Carla Vissers once referred to as a slender novel. Heidi and Carla and I fantasized about writing such a novel, assuming it would be easier than writing a long novel. So far that has not been the case. And slender suggests that the leanness just happened naturally; for me the leanness is hard won, so I’ll call it instead a healthy fit novel, a muscular novel. Small, but able to punch hard.

I just have sent the novel back to Bill in hopes that it’s ready to begin its move toward publication, which takes a long time. But when I looked up from my computer into the face of America, I saw that a certain billionaire, along with his boy toys, has been closing up federal departments and gathering up Americans’ personal information.

And meanwhile, while I was cutting out ambiguity and repetition, our new president has decided he wants American to own not only Canada, Greenland, and Panama, but Gaza as well. So I took a breath and called two senators and my U.S. representative as well as my state attorney general and registered my complaints.

We must take part in the fight for our nation’s sanity, but for a little while it was nice to have something important and small—in the scheme of things—demanding my attention, this intense country-noir novel that celebrates the a hard-won joy of family and Christmas.

Yes, at the end of the video above, Don Quixote eats the poem. That is what you are seeing. And I just bought some rice paper for future poems.